Tag: Karen Christensen

I was so surprised when I read today that TS Eliot’s wife is still alive. But Valerie Eliot was only 30 years old when he married her. He was 68 himself. Phew, she was not even half his age. And it was she who pursued him working as his secretary for eight years before he married her in 1957, 10 years after the death of his first wife, Vivien. She did not have him long. He died eight years later in 1965.

The story is told in The Guardian by Karen Christensen, who worked on the first volume of Eliot’s letters. She has an axe to grind. She hoped to publish letters from Eliot’s later life after she came out with the first volume in 1988. But she can’t. She writes: